[Arm-netbook] "smarter" phone

[Zsolt Sztupak]

On 28 May 2013, at 13:01, "luke.leighton" <luke.leighton at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 11:59 AM, Zsolt Sztupak <mail at sztupy.hu> wrote:
>> 
>> On 28 May 2013, at 11:51, Neal Peacock <neal at nic-stix.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Vladimir Pantelic <vladoman at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Philip Hands wrote:
>>>>> "luke.leighton" <luke.leighton at gmail.com> writes:
>>>>> 
>>>>>> http://www.c2mtl.com/eye50/ideas/smarter-phone/
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> wooow.  i love it.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Nice.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Not _very_ related, but another phone that someone mentioned on
>>>> Planet
>>>>> Debian recently, that might pique interest here:
>>>>> 
>>>>>  http://www.fairphone.com/
>>>>> 
>>>>> in particular their attempts to find manufacturer's that don't rub
>>>> their
>>>>> ethics up the wrong way.
>>>> 
>>>> given the very closed and protective nature of MTK, I fail to see how
>>>> a phone using their SoC can be "fair"...
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> The MTK kernel source is out finally.  Alcatel has released it for processors up to even the recent quad core.
> 
> good for them!  wow.  i'm impressed.  alcatel was the source of GPL
> compliance for previous kernel sources for mediatek processors as
> well.
> 
>> Still kinda useless (if you want to modify Android) without the Android platform code that was changed.
> 
> android is under the apache2 license.  there is absolutely no reason
> in hell why they should release the code.  there is absolutely no
> legal obligation for them to release the code.

I know. I just wanted to add another reason why I don't believe this being a "fair" phone.

> 
> now you know why the apache2 license is such a fucking bad idea.

That's debatable. Without it, Android would probably not have this market share (HTC, Samsung, Sony, etc. would definitely not want to open source all the changes they made to their own kind of Android) and maybe the best hackable phone would still be the Windows Mobile 6.5, which is… well even more closed. And less Android phones means less incentive to fix issues with the Linux kernel on ARM (and MIPS), which means the viability of Android-alternatives (Meego, Ubuntu Phone, etc.) would be even less as it is now. So in the end the apache 2 licence might actually make GPL-ed operating systems possible for mobile devices.

Of course we don't know what would have happened if Android was GPL-ed. But I wouldn't call using the apache 2 licence a fucking bad idea. It might be a bad idea, but definitely not fucking bad.

 SztupY